August 08, 2006

Where's the Snooze Button?

If you take a look at most of the posts to this blog, it's fairly clear I am a night owl by nature. I'm often more productive from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. than most people seem to be from 8 a.m. to noon. I am commonly up late, and when I do get up early, it's only to race into the office, not to saunter around the house and grab a leisurely breakfast or any of that nonsense. Today was a whole other matter. With my wife and mother-in-law on an end of summer trip to Idaho and Montana (of all places), the pair needed to catch an early flight out of San Francisco, and you can guess who got drafted to play chauffeur. That meant we were up at 4:30 a.m., to leave home by 5, pick up the mother-in-law at 5:30, and drop them off at SFO by 6.

By the time I turned around and made it into the office, it was 6:30 a.m., and as anybody knows, you never gain brownie points with management for the extra hours you may put in that they don't see. If you're not sending out e-mails and making calls immediately, it really doesn't count in a world where you don't punch a clock.

Sure, there were others there, but mostly those who deal with customers on the East Coast, necessitating a regular early start. For me, it was something resembling alien territory, and I still felt somewhat guilty leaving the office by 5, even though I had effectively put in what could be considered a 10 1/2 hour shift, mainly to make sure the dog was fed.

With my wife out for the week, the beagle, at home by herself all day, would no doubt have started consuming the furniture and wreaking general havoc were I not home exactly by 5:30 p.m. to give her dinner. She does, after all, seem to have an internal alarm clock that's more accurate than most watches. I think we made it by 5:27, and she ate at 5:40, just within the levels of acceptability.

That catches us up to my appropriate amount of whining that I'm fatigued. Maybe when I was younger I could handle big shifts in schedule, and pull all-nighters, but not any longer. As with Saturday, I'll be lucky to keep my eyes open through the full nine-inning game tonight. But we'll give it our best shot.